Thursday, January 12, 2012

Haiti Two Years Later

Today marks the two year anniversary of the devastating earthquake that buried Haiti in rubble. This is an article I wrote last year, published in the Good News, where I interviewed Angel Aloma, director of Food for the Poor. Haiti still needs help.

By Bryon Mondok
The Good News

Since the first days after the quake, Food For The Poor has worked to
alleviate suffering and rebuild the lives of the Haitian people, said
Angel Aloma, Executive Director of Food For The Poor in an interview
with the Good News. “It’s a long-term solution. There are no short cuts
to it.”
Food For The Poor launched a campaign two days after the earthquake and have continued the work ever since.
“It’s continuous. We’ve been there for 24 years. And we have
accelerated our work tremendously. But it’s not a special campaign. It’s
a continuous effort.” said Angel Aloma, Executive Director of Food For
The Poor
Aloma was born in Santiago, Cuba, and raised in Jamaica. He received his Master’s Degree from Nova Southeastern University.
Growing up in Jamaica has uniquely equipped Aloma with the necessary
skills to guide Food For The Poor through the organization’s incredible
growth. Because Aloma is especially attuned to the plight of the poor in
the western hemisphere, he leads numerous mission trips to the
Caribbean countries.
“Food For The Poor is in just about every city in Haiti,” Says Aloma.
“We have distribution centers in the north and the east and the west and
the south. Because we work through churches, we have a tremendous
network of more than 2,600 recipients who actually collect from our
distribution centers and then they distribute to their churches and the
churches distribute to the final beneficiaries. Our mission, basically,
is to turn the church of the first world to church of the third world.”

Good News: Tell our readers what was going through your mind when you
saw the news about the earthquake. Were you in South Florida at the
time?
“I was about to leave for the Dominican Republic. When it happened, I
was about to meet with the president of the Dominican Republic, but the
meeting was cancelled. I was on my way to the airport when I got a phone
call saying the president would not be able to see me. So I cancelled
the trip and then about half an hour later, all hell broke loose in
Haiti. It was a shock for us; we had a group there from Lynn University
going with some of our staff members. And, unfortunately, although eight
of the twelve students survived, four students from Lynn University and
two faculty members lost their lives at the Hotel Montana. We also had a
staff member that was with them that was buried in rubble for 17 hours
before she was saved.“
Good News: How soon after the earthquake were you able to get into the country?
“I went down there six days after the earthquake, myself, and spent
eight days in Haiti. I had to go through the Dominican Republic. I
brought in a convoy of four trucks with water and medicines and cement
to start the rebuilding. I took 1,500 bags of cement. That’s the actual
truck that I rode over on.”

Good News: What was it like being on the ground there?
“When I went to the Hotel Montana - where I always stayed - I saw it
completely in rubble. Knowing that four of the students and two teachers
from Lynn had died there and that one of our staff had been buried
there for 17 hours, the owner came up to me and hugged me and started
crying. I started crying also. It is just very, very sad. When I drove
downtown, seven to fourteen days after the earthquake, there were still
dead bodies all over the place. The stench in the city was horrendous.
One night, my nose actually bled from blowing it so much trying to get
rid of the stench. I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies in my life, but I
wasn’t prepared for the decomposition of the bodies. The stench was all
over the city. Downtown you could see the bodies, but there were areas
where you couldn’t. Bodies were buried under the rubble, but you could
still smell them. It was a very pervasive situation.”

Good News: How do you respond to the cholera situation? When your
mission is to distribute food, how does a crisis like that play into
what you are doing? Is it an interruption of your work?
“Since the cholera outbreak, we have installed thirty solar powered
water purification units. These are systems that will purify, if you
have a water source, regardless of how contaminated the water source
might be, up to 10,000 gallons per day. We have installed 30 of those in
the Artibonite area, the area with the most cholera incidents. That
means that we have a total production of 300,000 gallons of pure water
per day. That came almost immediately after the cholera epidemic
started.“

Good News: How are you able to handle set back after set back? How do you endure them?
“I saw some of the most inspiring things that I’ve ever seen. At one of
the tent cities I met some women that had lost their babies in the
earthquake. In the midst of their grief, they had volunteered to breast
feed the infants that had lost their mothers. And I thought to myself,
‘my God, can anyone give more of themselves than that?‘ The generosity
of the people who are suffering toward each other is amazing. I saw
people whose hands were bleeding from helping their neighbors dig out
the rubble to try find their relatives even though, by that time, the
majority of them had died. They wanted to at least give them a decent
burial.”

Good News: What does that do to your faith?
“It strengthens it. It strengthens it because when we drove home at
night around nine o‘clock after very long days, we had to drive around
groups of people whose churches had been destroyed. They were
congregating in the streets to worship and praise. I thought to myself
that if these people, who have every right to feel forsaken by life and
by God, if they are able to maintain their faith and be here, now,
amidst the tragedy of lost family members, lost possessions, lost homes,
and lost churches, and still gather to worship and thank God for their
blessings, that really strengthens my faith, let me tell you.”
Food For The Poor provided millions of meals from the rice, beans,
canned goods and water that were shipped into Haiti. They’ve installed
latrines near tent cities where several thousand people were sharing
fewer than a dozen portable toilets. Solar lights have been installed
near the latrines in tent cities and other communities to provide a
higher level of safety for the people living nearby.
By the end of November, 2010, Food For The Poor sent 1,377 containers
valued a $182 million in relief to help the people in Haiti. These
containers included food, water, and water filtration systems,
medicines, building supplies, tools, boots and hygiene kits in response
to the cholera.
“This isn’t a campaign with a beginning a middle and an end. Haiti is
going to need help for the next 20 or 30 years,“ Aloma said.

For more information about
Food For The Poor, go to www.foodforthepoor.org.